Red and Blue France, Revisited

Following up on our post from Sunday, Rush Limbaugh cited our red and blue state map of France today. I’m not sure, though, that we have gotten to the bottom of what these divisions mean in the context of French politics. At first I thought the pattern was very similar to our own red/blue divide, at least in cultural terms, but Michael Barone interpreted it in an email to us in almost exactly the opposite fashion. Rush reproduces the map we got from Le Monde and adopts my original interpretation of the data, but I think there are depths here that are yet to be plumbed.